1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a human network management service, and more specifically to a method for defining common elements between phonebook data of a mobile terminal and human network data of various social network sites on the Internet, and linking human network data provided on the Internet with the mobile terminal, thereby providing a social network service, which has previously been provided only on the Internet, in the mobile terminal.
2. Description of the Related Art
A social network represents a network that horizontally broadens from oneself on the basis of identities of individual people in the Internet.
The network adds people who have similar interests to an individual, thereby distinguishing a social network from general communities. Since a person having social relationships with other people may be affected by human networks and estimations of personal value, social networks have emphasized relationships with other people. Since social networks emphasizing these social relationships are highly useful for establishing personal identities and for human networking, social networks are rapidly growing.
Social networks includes, for example, MYSPACE®, FACEBOOK®, HI5®, ORKUT®, LINKEDIN®, FRIENDSTER®, BEBO®, and CYWORLD®, which are sites currently providing computer-based social network services. Other new sites providing new services are continuously being created. Since users may have preferences for particular sites used by many of their friends or sites that provide more convenient services, the user often navigates between multiple sites providing the social network. However, when the user migrates from a first social networking site A to a second social networking site B, the user must again input information on himself/herself and information (i.e. social network information) about acquaintances who form a connection with the user at site A, which wastes time and is troublesome to the user.
Meanwhile, a phone book (i.e., a telephone directory) of a mobile terminal, which a user maintains without regard to time and place, stores basic information, including cell phone numbers, home telephone numbers, birthdays, e-mail addresses, group information, etc., of people who have become acquainted with the user through various aspects of the user's life, e.g., work, school, family, etc. The phone book can store information about many acquaintances who have various depths of connections with the user, from casual acquaintances to people having more significant relationships with the user, such as very close friends, etc. However, the phone book of the mobile terminal is limited to expressing a relation between the user and each acquaintance only with “group” information, and phone book data is currently only used within the mobile terminal as information for calls, texts, etc.
Conventional human network management technology can assign only one main group and one subgroup when appointing a relationship between the user and a counterpart, thereby having a disadvantage in that it is impossible to express relationships used with various human networks. In addition, conventional human network management technology does not provide a method for extending data about acquaintances registered in a social network site in cooperation with phone book data in a mobile terminal, and also does not provide a method for expressing the phone book data through various elements, such as acquaintance data expressed on a social networking web site.